Let’s talk about my blog for a minute! 

Back in May, it would have been three years since I started my blog. I started it in May 2021 during one of the many lockdowns we had here in the UK. I started it because I thoroughly enjoyed writing and I thoroughly enjoyed reading and so I thought I could combine the two of them by creating a blog and hey, if it ended up making me thousands of £ a month that would be great too! (it hasn’t.)

For a long time, I had a lot of passion for it – I enjoyed writing my reviews and coming up with new article ideas that could bring in a wealth of new views and viewers each month.

However, over the past few months, my priorities have realigned as times have changed, I’ve tried new digital methods and realised where the real interaction is.

I’ve thought about what it is that’s causing me to change my priorities and have settled on the following three areas:

1. Stagnated viewership

For a long time, I was seeing a constant rise in the number of people viewing my blog. Then for a period during 2023, my view count slowed down and began to reduce, but then I had a huge month in the middle of the year and all the numbers went green again, and so my passion continued. 

However, over the past few months, the figures have been dropping again. This is obviously partly due to me not writing and posting as much anymore and the initial blog posts that were doing very well now being older so likely not appearing too highly in Google’s search results, but either way, it’s a factor to my enjoyment of it all.

Going through my Google Analytics at the end of the month to write my round-up reviews and seeing a red arrow pointing down quite often doesn’t fill me with the biggest wave of positivity to go out and write new, original articles.

2. Amount of time

To come up with, write, create the graphics for and then post to my socials for every single blog post takes around one to two hours at the very least. 

In comparison, to record a TikTik video or put out a tweet that gets a great amount of engagement, these can take five minutes maximum depending on how much editing I need to do.

Therefore, when I have some spare time around working a 9-5, trying to keep fit, having a social life and spending time with my partner, I often find myself focusing my efforts on other social media platforms as I can get a lot more content done for these in far less time, allowing me more spare time to actually read and play video games (my other hobby).

3. Other platforms get more engagement

And then the third, final and possibly biggest reason that encompassed both of the previous reasons really is that other platforms just give me more engagement.

If I post a video to TikTok or Instagram, I almost instantly get comments and Likes that make it feel like people are watching and engaging with the content. However, after spending a couple of hours on a blog post, I’d be lucky to get any comments at all, let alone the instant gratification you get from social media paltforms.

Therefore, the combination of this more instant gratification for my efforts and the fact that all my social media channels are in fact still growing makes it feel like my time and effort is much better spent focusing on these places.

So what’s next?

There has been a part of my brain recently that has considered stopping my blog altogether. And there’s also been another part that’s thought it may just be better to change it’s purpose – less reviews, more opinionated, personal content.

The time, effort and lack of engagement, as well as the fact it’s not making me any income (well, a few quid a month) mean that it feels like I’m putting in a lot of effort for very little gain when I could be focusing a lot more of my time in places that could bring quicker feedback and more engagement.

However, I do still enjoy writing. Whenever I get a thought in my head, I want to go ahead and write that down.

I have also thought about branching out the blog to include other hobbies of mine – more engaging content. Mainly – video gaming.

People talk of reading books the same way I think about playing video games. How excited they get to get home and pick up a book or how reading for them is when they’re at their happiest or at peace. These are exactly the way I think of video gaming. Yes, I thoroughly enjoy reading, it’s a massive hobby of mine but I think I enjoy the idea of stories more than I enjoy the idea of the activity of reading. Whereas, I utterly adore the activity of playing video games.

So maybe that’s something I’ll look into – branching Luke’s Blog out to include some video gaming content. Maybe initially I’ll try and integrate the two – “if you like this book, try this game” and vice versa sort of thing. Who knows?

At this point I’m just rambling as I write.

Rest assured, this blog won’t be going anywhere anytime soon. I just wanted to offer you a more honest and personal look into what running my blog at the moment is like. Unless you’re discussing finance or health, there isn’t a vast amount of traction in blogging at the moment!

Let me know your thoughts below. Are you a book blogger who’s having the same thoughts about blogs and social media or am I missing something that could bring back my passion?

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